Lendle

I used to think I could never write a lengthy fiction manuscript for two reasons. I always preferred to write nonfiction, and it’s my nature to want to say as much as possible in as few words as possible. The second problem was easily solved by putting together the best of my brief writings from the past 30 years and thus acquiring what is, for me, a VERY lengthy manuscript. Solving the first problem was rather traumatic for me. For three decades or more, I’d been convinced I was writing nonfiction and coming up with original ideas in science and philosophy. After all that preparation, I plucked up the courage to submit my ideas to dozens and dozens of scientists and scientific journals for what, I felt sure, would be welcoming comments and eagerness to publish. For years I did this, always getting my work totally ignored except for the few replies telling me it was nonsense or that they wouldn’t consider publishing it. I’m not alone when it comes to the strictness of science publishers. Albert Einstein’s 1905 paper on the special theory of relativity would probably be unpublishable if it had been submitted a hundred years later because, according to “Coming of Age in the Milky Way” by Timothy Ferris – the Bodley Head 1988 – p. 191, “The emergence of the special theory of relativity was as unconventional as its author. (It) resembles the work of a crank; it contains no citations whatever from the scientific literature, and mentions the aid of but one individual, (his friend Michele Angelo) Besso, who was not a scientist.” We have to be tremendously grateful for the remarkable insight of scientist and editor “… Max Planck (who, when he) looked up from reading the first relativity paper, knew at once that the world had changed.” (“Coming of Age in the Milky Way”, p. 183) So resolution of my first problem became simple – I merely had to accept the wisdom of the scientific community and come to terms with the fact that I had always been writing nothing BUT fiction. Why do I call my writings Pinocchio fiction? Because I’m too stubborn to accept the scientific community’s wisdom and, just as the puppet Pinocchio yearned to be a real boy, my writings are fiction (apparently) that aspire to be nonfiction. Maybe the public and novel publishers will say this isn’t fiction – after all, there are references to factual matters and repetition of certain points (this is designed to drive home the repeated material but this characteristic isn’t seen in conventional fiction). But if it isn’t nonfiction and it isn’t fiction, what can it be? Could it be an original and newly invented category called Pinocchio fiction? Many people seem to accept this new category since I’ve posted samples of my writing on the Internet – they’ve been downloaded more than 40,000 times as I type this.